Word: maughams
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...labor in a French coal mine), and it makes the earnest pilgrim a lot easier for his friends (not to mention the movie audience) to take. Besides, playful self-deflation suits Bill Murray, who only did Ghostbusters in return for a shot at the second screen version of Somerset Maugham's most gaseous novel. The laid-back eccentricity of his Larry Darrell disrupts the slick romantic parabola of the story, in a way pretty Tyrone Power never could. And provides a few conscious laughs to balance the unconscious humor that inevitably bubbles up along with its spiritual vaporings...
...fashion press, which shows reverence for his work and dotes on his ebullience, has taken to calling Lagerfeld Monte Karl, as if he were some kind of vintage decadent out of Somerset Maugham. Lagerfeld has raised no objection to the name; indeed, as a man who writes his own press kits and describes the "elegant aerodynamics" of his Chanels, he surely knows the value of a catchy moniker. It makes him sound comfortably unlike the world-class designer that he is, hardly the creator of dresses that may, in time, end up where he would probably least like...
...doing a scene from Oscar Wilde ("You know, I don't really appreciate the Virgin Mary. She always looks so dull"). West is mischievously iconoclastic about famous authors as only one who has rubbed elbows with them can be. Shaw's was "a poor mind, I think"; Maugham "couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart...
...past few years, oversize, prize-winning stories of figures as varied as Somerset Maugham and Theodore Roosevelt, Isak Dinesen and Lyndon Johnson have sold briskly and drawn critical raves. The volumes have rescued the genre from charges that it was succumbing to the as-told-to stories of celebrities like Phil Donahue, such drugboilers as Albert Goldman's Elvis and George Plimpton and Jean Stein's Edie, essentially a snip-and-paste collage of interviews. Moreover, these new lives are not exclusively devoted to the scholarly examination of papers and letters. "Not long ago, most biographies were compiled...
...Morgan regards the invasion of privacy as a sacred duty. The former reporter, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1961, is now noted for the objectivity of his portraits of the youthful Winston in Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry and of the aged Willie in Maugham. But they are edged with steel. Morgan, 50, feels that either love or hate is a dangerous conceit. Says he: "You have to be clinical, like a coroner dissecting a corpse." His scalpel reveals a Churchill swollen with hubris and a stingy Maugham pathologically concealing his homosexuality from the public...